Tastes
by dysprositos
Summary: Taste is a funny thing. A look at taste and the original 6 Avengers. Each vignette takes place at a different point in Avengers history.


**Warnings for alcoholism, Bruce's suicide attempt, and generally poor writing.**

 **Unedited and unbeta'd.**

* * *

Bruce Banner figured that once you've had a gun in your mouth, nothing really tastes the same.

It's not that a gun leaves a taste in your mouth. It does have a taste, of course, and not a pleasant one. Having a gun in your mouth isn't a pleasant experience overall. The feel of hard metal against your teeth, your tongue pressed down against the bottom of your mouth, your heart beating out of your chest, trying to escape the body that's decide to annihilate itself. But the _taste._ The taste of the metal mixes with the bitterness of adrenaline and it's enough to gag you, if you weren't already gagging on fear and desperation.

It's disgusting.

Bruce knew this, because he was a man who put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger and lived to remember the taste.

But the taste doesn't last forever, of course it doesn't.

It's more the _memory_ of the taste that lasts forever. Like your tongue remembers what you tried to do to yourself and has decided that it's going to get what revenge it can. And everything takes on a certain bitterness, a certain unpalatable texture. Food might have once brought pleasure, but after you've had a gun in your mouth, Bruce thought, it all mostly tasted the same.

He imagined it was what failure tasted like.

* * *

All booze contains ethanol, but it doesn't all taste the same.

This Tony knew, because he'd had it all. Vodka, rum, gin, tequila. Whiskey. Brandy. And scotch, endlessly scotch.

All booze tastes different, at least going down.

Coming up, though...coming up again, it mostly tastes the same.

Tony was not an alcoholic. This he maintained most ardently. It was hard sometimes, though, like when he'd been binging for three days and had just woken up on the fourth with a hangover bad enough to make him wish he was strapped to Stark Industry's latest missile.

Upon waking, he'd thought he'd at least be able to keep from puking, but he'd been wrong. Disastrously, as he hadn't even made it to the bathroom before the nausea had turned to gagging and then vomiting.

And the expensive scotch he'd been drinking for three days? The absolute top shelf stuff that he insisted on buying himself because he was Tony Stark and he could afford it?

Coming back up, it didn't taste any better than the $10 shit he could pick up at any corner liquor store.

And as he knelt on his kitchen floor next to a puddle of puke, the acidic taste of bile in the back of his throat, he wondered if maybe it was time to start cleaning his act up.

* * *

Clint Barton would eat anything, and gladly.

He'd been poor enough before he'd been picked up by SHIELD that he'd been eating from garbage cans. Compared to that, any food was gourmet. He'd try anything, and he liked most of it. Even the stuff he didn't like he finished because, hey, food.

But there was one exception.

Clint could not abide the taste of cotton candy.

Life in the circus for a kid had been pretty rough. Lots of traveling, not a lot of adult supervision. And one thing that had really suffered was his health. Specifically, his oral health.

He didn't have time to see a dentist while he was on the road, and it wasn't like there was anyone to take him or to pay for it.

When he'd gotten finally gotten dental coverage as an adult, he'd needed almost $10,000 worth of work done to get his mouth in order.

Ten. Thousand. Dollars. And it had taken almost two years of drilling and surgery and _pain_.

All of this, Clint blamed, perhaps irrationally, on the cotton candy.

As a kid in the circus, he'd had all the cotton candy he wanted. There was always leftovers at the end of every show and Clint, being a kid and not especially health savvy, had happily indulged in it whenever he could. What kid doesn't like cotton candy?

As an adult, though...Clint knew better. Sometimes the sight of cotton candy was enough to cause a phantom ache in his mouth. The one time he'd tried to eat it as an adult, he'd gagged after one bite and refused to even look at the stuff.

Clint Barton would eat anything, and gladly. Except cotton candy.

"Cotton candy," he'd once told Natasha, "Can fuck right off."

And it was a sentiment he stood behind firmly...despite what _other people_ had to say.

* * *

Natasha loved cotton candy.

Given how her life started out, it wasn't a surprise to anyone that she hadn't actually tried the confection until she was well into adulthood. Where would a spy, raised from girlhood to _be_ a spy, find time for something as frivolous as empty calories? No, until after she started working for SHIELD, the food she put into her body served only one purpose: fuel. She didn't have a favorite food, let alone a favorite kind of junk food.

Cotton candy wasn't fuel, therefore, it was a waste of time.

But once she started working with SHIELD, and started to have a life outside of her work, she actually started to develop food preferences. It took time, and she still ate mindfully of what her body needed, but eventually she had a whole list of favorite and least favorite foods.

Junk food took longer, and it was actually Clint who introduced her to cotton candy through his sheer, unadulterated hatred of it.

"That shit is disgusting," he'd said, nodding towards a cotton candy vendor in Central Park. The two of them were taking an early lunch after kicking each others' asses during training. They'd just finished lunch at an Indian restaurant and were heading back to headquarters when they'd decided to take a tour of the park.

"Cotton candy?" Natasha asked. She knew what it was, even if she hadn't had it.

"Yeah," Clint said, disgust evident in his voice. "Fucking terrible."

And, well, if Clint hated something that much, Natasha _had_ to try it.

She'd immediately walked over and bought some. And it wasn't terrible or disgusting, no, it was _amazing_.

"You're nuts," she'd told Clint, happily pulling the cotton candy apart and letting it melt on her tongue. "This stuff is great."

Clint had just mumbled something about 'brush your teeth' before turning away in apparent horror.

Natasha had just shrugged. She knew Clint was nuts-once upon a time he'd gone against direct orders to kill her, after all-so she just accepted it as part of his weirdness.

That didn't mean she didn't playfully argue with him about the merits of cotton candy, though.

Because just because he was crazy didn't mean he wasn't also _wrong._

* * *

Steve was used to the taste of blood in his mouth.

He'd been beaten up a lot in his life. He'd never been able to keep his mouth shut and he'd never been able to back down from a fight. Before the serum, that had led to him getting punched in the mouth. A lot.

After the serum, well. He still got punched in the mouth a lot. But it took a lot more force to actually damage him.

Unfortunately, Bucky, aka The Winter Soldier, could deliver that kind of force.

And Steve just desperately wished that Bucky would snap out of it because he didn't have the _time_ for this fight right now. He just wanted to stop the HYDRA/SHIELD controlled helicarrier from deploying its multiple weapons. But Bucky was HYDRA's weapon, much like Steve had been SHIELD's, so if he wanted to stop HYDRA, he had to stop Bucky.

Which wasn't going well, for either of them.

Steve used his shield to block a punch and push Bucky back, but Bucky rushed forward again and managed to land a punch right in Steve's mouth.

And Steve's teeth cut deeply into the inside of his cheek, and he tasted blood.

At least he couldn't feel any teeth rolling around in his mouth. No, just blood. Lots of blood.

Steve sighed. Just because he was used to the taste didn't mean he liked it.

He dodged another punch and spat out a mouthful of dark red blood. Didn't do anything for the taste, though. The taste lingered.

Steve sighed again. The sooner this fight ended, the better.

* * *

Contrary to popular belief, Thor did not especially care for Pop Tarts.

As far as the food on Midgard went, they weren't the worst thing he'd had. That dubious honor went to something called the "Filet o'Fish," a "fish" "sandwich" from an establishment called McDonald's. No, Pop Tarts weren't that level of terrible, but they weren't fantastic either. They had a chemical taste, and underneath that, they were sickeningly sweet.

They were not without benefit, however. They were calorically dense. And if he was going to be on Midgard, Thor needed the extra calories.

Despite looking like one, Thor wasn't a human. And he used energy very differently than humans do. A lot of his energy went into being, for lack of a better word, "magical." His nearly indestructibility, his accelerated healing, his use of Mjolnir to fly...all those things required untold amounts of energy.

While he was on Asgard, doing all that stuff wasn't a problem-he could siphon the energy from the world around him. But his body wasn't capable of doing that on Midgard or any of the other realms. So without a consistent source of energy input, he'd quickly become exhausted. It was part of the reason there was always a feast to welcome warriors home to Asgard-they needed to replenish their energy stores.

So while he was on Midgard, Thor had to stay on top of the constant energy drain, and that required eating a lot of what Midgardians referred to as "junk food." Things that were high in fat and calories. Huge amounts of protein. Whatever was at hand. Including, of course, Pop Tarts.

After all, they weren't _terrible_. Especially the strawberry ones.

The strawberry ones were actually rather enjoyable.


End file.
